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Irish Women's Immigration to the United States After the Potato Famine, 1860-1900

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Irish Women's Immigration to the United States After the Potato Famine, 1860-1900 Dominican Scholar Senior Theses Student Scholarship 5-2015 Irish Women's Immigration to the United States After the Potato Famine, 1860-1900 Mackenzie S. Flanagan Dominican University of California https://doi.org/10.33015/dominican.edu/2015.HIST.ST.01 Survey: Let us know how this paper benefits you. Recommended Citation Flanagan, Mackenzie S., "Irish Women's Immigration to the United States After the Potato Famine, 1860-1900" (2015). Senior Theses. 42. https://doi.org/10.33015/dominican.edu/2015.HIST.ST.01 This Senior Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at Dominican Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Theses by an authorized administrator of Dominican Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. IRISH WOMEN’S IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES AFTER THE POTATO FAMINE, 1860-1900 A senior thesis submitted to the History Faculty of Dominican University of California in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts in History by Mackenzie Flanagan San Rafael, California December 2015 Copyright 2015 Mackenzie Flanagan 2 ABSTRACT Thousands of single Irish women emigrated to the United States after the Great Potato Famine. These women left Ireland because social conditions in Ireland limited their opportunities for fulfilling lives. Changes in marriage and inheritance patterns lowered the status of unmarried women and made marriage increasingly unlikely. As a result, many women emigrated to the United States and, once here, worked, used their wages to help others emigrate, and most eventually married. Irish culture facilitated this mass migration by promoting the autonomy of single women yet limiting their options. Emigration did not signify a break with their Irish culture and their families but represented a culturally approved solution to the constraints single women faced in Ireland. 3 Table of Contents 1. Historiography 1 2. Social Conditions in Post-Famine Ireland 7 3. The Decision to Emigrate 15 4. Life for Single Irish Women in the United States 18 5. The Significance of Immigration 22 6. Conclusion 27 7. Selected Bibliography 29 4 1. Historiography Ireland was devastated by a potato blight, which resulted in a widespread famine between 1845 and 1852. One immediate result of the famine was massive emigration of entire families to the United States. Another result was dramatic changes in Irish society, including changes in inheritance, marriage, and land ownership. These shifts changed the place of women in their families and in Irish society. Consequently, many single Irish women made the decision to emigrate to the United States between 1860-1900. Between 1871 and 1891, 55,690 Irish women emigrated to the U.S. compared to 55,215 men for the same time period.1 This female dominated migration stream was unique to the Irish and reflected their cultural values. In “Women in 19th Century Irish Emigration,” historian Pauline Jackson argues that more women then men emigrated from Ireland after the potato famine because women had fewer opportunities to marry or to find paid work. Consequently, women were placed in a subordinate social position by the patriarchal culture of Ireland. Jackson cites census data from Ireland and the United States to show that 50% of Irish emigrants were female compared to 33% of all immigrants from Europe.2 Jackson examines the work of social scientists who debate the connection between the low marriage rates in nineteenth century Ireland 1 Robert E. Kennedy, The Irish: Emigration, Marriage, and Fertility (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 66 2 Pauline Jackson, “Women in 19th Century Irish Emigration,” International Migration Review 18, no. 4, Special Issue: “Women in Migration” (December 01, 1984): 1006, accessed January 29, 2015, JSTOR. 5 and the high emigration rates. She convincingly argues that the low marriage rate caused the high emigration rate and not the other way around. Connecting changes in land ownership to changes in marriage customs, Jackson claims that economic conditions meant fewer Irish women were able to marry. After the famine, only twenty to fifty percent of Irish women of marriageable age were able marry. 3 Jackson cites Irish poetry as evidence of the difficulty poor women faced in being able to marry. Jackson sums up her evidence: “The narrow range of options open to unmarried women in post-famine Ireland made emigration a rational choice for those excluded from a recognized place in the society.”4 However, Jackson concludes, “[T]he post-famine emigration of women was a refusal to accept the servile role allotted to them in their society and a rejection of the patriarchal values underpinning it.”5 Jackson sees single women’s immigration as a rejection of their culture and its underlying patriarchy. In “Women and Migration: The Social Consequences of Gender,” sociologist Silvia Pedraza reviews the literature on the role of women in migration. Pedraza looks at women immigrants from around the world and immigration flows during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She examines the decision to migrate and the effects of migration on the immigrant women, their families, and their new society. One of Pedraza arguments is: “[G]ender plays a central role in the decision 3 Jackson, “Women in 19th Century,” 1017. 4 Ibid., 1006. 5 Ibid., 1015. 6 to migrate.”6 Pedraza cites studies of women immigrants from the Dominican Republic and Mexico to show that females may initiate immigration decisions. 7 Historian Timothy J. Meagher uses a unique methodology to gather information for his article, “Sweet Good Mothers and Young Women Out In The World: The Roles of Irish American Women in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Worcester, Massachusetts.” Meagher reviewed copies of the Catholic Messenger, an Irish Catholic newspaper in Worcester, Massachusetts, to gather information about attitudes toward women held by Irish and Irish Americans in the later half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Meagher concludes that Irish culture drew a “sharp distinction between the roles of married and unmarried women.”8 Meagher quotes extensively from articles about women’s leisure activities and participation in the church and politics to support his point: “Few western cultures combined nineteenth century Ireland’s rigid and narrow limitations of married women’s sphere with the latitude Irish culture afforded single women in their freedom to migrate and find employment.”9 6 Silvia Pedraza, “Women and Migration: The Social Consequences of Gender.” Annual Review of Sociology 17, (January 01, 1991), 321, accessed January 29, 2015, JSTOR. 7 Pedraza, "Women and Migration,” 306. 8 Timothy J. Meagher, "Sweet Good Mothers and Young Women Out in the World: The Roles of Irish American Women in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Worcester, Massachusetts," U.S. Catholic Historian 5, no. 3/4, (July 01, 1986): 325, accessed January 29, 2015, JSTOR. 9 Meagher, "Sweet Good Mothers and Young Women,” 325. 7 Meagher’s research shows emigration and employment by single Irish women was consistent with their culture rather than a rejection of it. Sociologist Dean Braa examines the causes and effects of the potato famine on social structures in Ireland in his article "The Great Potato Famine and the Transformation of Irish Peasant Society."10 Braa documents how the reliance on the potato shaped the inheritance and marriage customs before the famine. As a result of changes in agriculture after the famine, both inheritance and marriage customs also changed. Braa’s article provides technical support for the research by historians on Irish women’s immigration. Historian Hasia Diner wrote a groundbreaking study of emigration by Irish women called Erin's Daughter in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century.11 Dinner analyzes the factors that influenced the decision of thousands of Irish women to leave their homeland and make new lives in America. She notes that women were driven by forces different from those, which drove men to emigrate. Women in post-famine Ireland had fewer opportunities to marry or to work outside the home. For these women emigration was a solution to a loss of status brought about by the Great Famine. Diner’s research and her conclusion that 10 Dean M. Braa, “The Great Potato Famine and the Transformation of Irish Peasant Society,” Science & Society 61, no. 2 (July 01, 1997): 193-215, accessed February 11, 2015, JSTOR. 11 Hasia R. Diner, Erin's Daughter in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (London: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1983). 8 emigration “did not represent a search for a new identity, nor did it constitute a break with the past” are central to this paper.12 Historian J.J. Lee examines the influence of the famine on the role of the Catholic Church and on the status of women in Ireland in his article, “Women and the Church since the Famine.”13 Lee traces the connections between the loss of women’s economic independence and their ability to marry. He also describes the increased power of the Church in the decades following the famine. For Lee, the expansion of the Church contributed to the marginalization of women in Irish society, which lead to their decisions to emigrate. Lee concludes that women emigrated in order to “begin once more to enjoy something of the economic independence many of them knew before the Famine.”14 This study concurs with many historians and sociologists that the decision to emigrate by single Irish women was a result of many changes in society that began after or were accelerated by the famine. These combined forces reduced the status of Irish women, especially single women, and limited their choices for paths to a meaningful life. Because Irish culture encouraged the ability of single women to emigrate on their own without family members, these women had the option to leave Ireland and seek a new life in the United States.
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